ANZ Bank, Virgin Airline outages cause havoc for customers

ANZ Bank and Virgin Airlines’ customers have had their weekend disrupted due to system outages.

The bank’s issues started on Saturday evening when its goMoney mobile banking app crashed causing major headaches for fans at the AFL grand final, particularly for the Richmond Tigers army who wanted cash to buy some celebratory drinks and for the beaten Adelaide Crows fans who wanted to drown their sorrows.

Queues at the Virgin Australia check-in area during its nationwide computer outage at Adelaide Airport on Sunday. Photo: AAP/Morgan Sette

Compounding the loss was an outage at Virgin Australia on Sunday, which caused lengthy queues at Adelaide airport.

An ANZ Bank spokesman said on Sunday “we are currently experiencing technical issues with our goMoney mobile banking app following planned maintenance”.

It was due to be back up and running by about 4pm, Sunday. The bank tweeted on Sunday morning, “Good morning everyone, goMoney is still unavailable & the team are working hard to get it back up. We’re really sorry for the inconvenience.

“We have a team of people working hard to fix the issue as quickly as possible and both internet banking and our Grow app remain unaffected,” the spokesman said.

“We’d like to apologise to our customers for the inconvenience we know this has caused.”

Virgin Airlines also took to social media, tweeting on Sunday afternoon, “we are currently experiencing a disruption to our check-in systems due to an Optus technical issue”.

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“We are continuing to check passengers in, but there are likely to be delays to your flights today. We recommend that anyone who is due to fly with us this afternoon allow extra time for check-in at the airport.

“Updates will be provided via our website and our social media channels.

“We are working with Optus to ensure the issue is rectified as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologise for any delays and inconvenience this has caused our guests and will provide further details as soon as possible.”

Internet outages are becoming front-page news affecting customers from banks to airlines, and even the ASX, which lost a whole day of trading in the past year.

The most recent that got the ire of the world was when Netflix users were left stranded mid-show during the new season of Game of Thrones.

The outage was caused by the high demand from the legal streaming services around the globe, which caused it to crash.

According to experts, the average cost of an unplanned outage is about $8851 per minute, up from $7908 the previous year.